Shanghai Community Radio (SHCR) celebrated its second anniversary last June with a party and a pair of house slippers. Designed by Berlin-based artists Tea Stražičić (aka flufflord) and bod [包家巷], the crypto-zoomorphic slides were conceptually inspired by the wave of drug raids that swept across Shanghai nightlife in 2019, temporarily closing many clubs and resulting in numerous arrests and deportations.

“A lot of people who watch us don’t go out,” says SHCR co-founder Katy Roseland. When the drug crackdown began last year, SHCR hosted karaoke parties in their studio to ameliorate the anxiety of at-risk friends. By the time their anniversary rolled around, Roseland says, “Our tagline for the [house shoe] campaign was: ‘Don’t go outside; don’t go to jail.’” Already primed to pump out indoor programming during tense times, SHCR responded nimbly to the Covid-19 outbreak in January, launching a mobile series of “Don’t Go Out” broadcasts at members’ homes to keep the virtual community intact.

SHCR Live: Eating Music Takeover

SHCR was launched in 2017 by a handful of DJs, producers, and artists, and is now managed by the trio of Roseland, Shanghai native Difan Xu, and Canadian-Chinese artist Sam Lu. One inspiration for the project was the formation of Genome 6.66Mbp, a label that took form at seminal Shanghai club The Shelter one year prior. Shelter gigs by touring artists like The Bug and local producers like Tzusing switched Xu on to DJing, and the venue incubated many relationships that would later galvanize collective energy. Music was always the core concern of SHCR, but the project kicked off with a distributed focus on events and live streams at subterranean DIY art spaces like the now defunct Basement6.

Last autumn, after an abrupt eviction, SHCR moved into a smaller, cleaner studio, and has refined its identity accordingly. Today it’s primarily a broadcast hub, a virtual space connecting disparate spheres of shared culture across Shanghai’s underground music landscape. In addition to frequent DJ streams, SHCR programs workshops, tutorials, and interviews. Regardless of content category, the tight rectangle of the on-camera studio booth is always backgrounded by a kinetic panoply of green-screened imagery. The twitching visuals embossed across all of SHCR’s live broadcasts and social media posts echo the aesthetic of online life in China, taking inspiration from the memes and stickers sent around social messaging app WeChat, and the unique forms of cultural expression innovated by users of streaming platforms like Bilibili and Kuaishou.

SHCR Talks: SHCR Interviews Andrew Thomas Huang

Even SHCR’s slippers were a byproduct of Chinese internet culture, with key parts of the production sourced from notoriously eclectic e-commerce site Taobao. Despite SHCR’s penchant for eye-jacking visuals, it’s the shoes that have been their biggest viral hit.

They caught the attention of Björk and FKA Twigs collaborator Andrew Thomas Huang, who met up with the group while passing through Shanghai last year, and went on-air for a longform interview over app-delivered takeout. Plugging an accomplished member of the Chinese diaspora in with a community of viewers in Shanghai was a milestone for SHCR, says Roseland: “it’s a testament to what this is as a service, for them to have conversations that they couldn’t have any way else.”

SHCR’s large cohort of community members includes local producers like Laughing Ears and Swimful, as well as overlapping efforts in other cities, like Hong Kong Community Radio and the FunctionLab label in nearby Hangzhou. Cross-city collaborations have taken the form of studio takeovers and offline parties, but the combined effect of random drug tests on venues in Shanghai and Hangzhou, and increased tension at the Hong Kong border during last year’s protests, has funnelled SHCR’s efforts more and more online.

Another organisation sharing SHCR’s virtual space is Subtropical Asia, a video platform helmed from Shanghai by director Zhao Renxiu, along with German music journalist Fabian Peltsch and China-based videographer William Griffith. The two outfits overlap – Subtropical Asia is currently working on a documentary about SHCR – but they reflect inverse goals: where SHCR fixes its spotlight on a hyperlocal scene, Subtropical Asia uses Shanghai as a base from which to produce stories about musical subcultures across the continent.

A documentary about Doch Chkae – Slumdog Metal: Cambodian Street Kids Scream For Their Lives

In addition to “Slumdog Metal,” a widely viewed short doc about Cambodian band Doch Chkae, Subtropical has covered events in China, like Damo Suzuki’s 2019 tour, and in Indonesia, where Zhao has spent time documenting the Yes No Wave label and affiliated artists like Gabber Modus Operandi and Senyawa. “In some Asian countries, due to political, cultural and poverty-related issues, many artists are struggling to survive and get access to a global audience,” she says. “Subtropical Asia came to solve this problem.

As a journalist in Berlin, Peltsch perceives a need to diversify the kinds of stories that are told about music from Asia. "We claim music is a universal language, but in reality music is a lot less global than art or literature,” he says. “The West is still oblivious to the subcultures and true faces that make up these vibrant cities,” adds Griffith, who shoots and produces much of Subtropical’s video content.

Zhao credits a young generation with more resources than the last, as well as a “complicated and unstable” political environment, with the “creativity and vitality of art” made in difficult circumstances across the region. “The paradoxical situation in Asia has created an abundant content pool for global storytellers like us,” she adds.

Damo Suzuki Documentary – Journey: Improvised

The story had shifted to Wuhan, Zhao’s hometown, by the end of January. Subtropical responded with a three-day special project, publishing diary posts and interviews from young creatives locked down in the viral epicentre. SHCR launched its “Don’t Go Out” series on February 2, plugging the social gap during quarantine and using their platform to broadcast on-the-ground updates from peers in Wuhan. SHCR’s format and tribulations over the last year have made them resilient and responsive in crisis, a bridge to normalcy throughout a panicked lockdown that is now coming to an end as some crucial Shanghai venues cautiously re-open.

“We’re lucky in how we’ve situated ourselves,” says SHCR’s Roseland. “You can literally take down our platform, it’s been done already — twice. But because the community will still bind together, you can still find the website, or NetEase music, or Soundcloud, there’s still a way to preserve a space even if there are no venues.”

The slippers: